Dulcimers may be of two types: (1) a fretted, mountain or lap dulcimer, or (2) a hammered dulcimer. When used herein the term dulcimer will refer only to the latter type, that is the hammered dulcimer.
A hammered dulcimer is a stringed instrument that is not fretted, that is there is a different string or string set for each tone that can be played with the instrument. The tones are played by striking the appropriate string set with a hammer, one hammer for each hand. Thus, a hammered dulcimer is a percussion instrument.
The case is usually trapezoidal for modern instruments, though instruments of many shapes have been made over the many thousands of years that the instrument has been in use.
Various factors may be used to evaluate a hammered dulcimer. Some of these are: aesthetic appearance, attack, dynamic range, intonation, playing qualities, sound quality or voice, stability, sustain or decay, tonal range, and weight. Individual players will rank these factors in different orders according to their personal hopes and artistic demands. There is no right or wrong or correct order to the list.
1) Aesthetic Appearance: Beauty should be judged on sound not upon dramatic visual appeal. It should be a beautiful listening experience.
2) Attack: This technical term refers to the initial onset of sound of any musical instrument. Too few hammered dulcimer players consider this aspect of an instrument. Players have limited control over how rapidly a sound is produced by an instrument. A tone may be struck hard and forced out of an instrument, but the controlling property of attack is in the hands of the designer and builder. The property of attack is intertwined with sustain. Great sustain often implies a muddy or slow attack. A weak sound is usually the result of a slow or mushy attack. The greater the attack, the greater expressive control a player has over an instrument. Some players refer to quality of attack in an instrument as punch, where once a player expresses a tone, the sound leaps out. This is a valuable quality in an instrument because it gives the player great control and expressive power. Without a clear attack, a player sounds tentative and muddy-undefined, inarticulate. It is important to note that high quality attack need not sacrifice sustain.
3) Dynamic Range: Wherever there are discussions of sound this technical term appears. Recording engineers often speak of this concept as head room. Most hammered dulcimers have poor dynamic range. On many instruments it is impossible to tell whether the hammer strike on a tone has been struck hard or soft. That means it is nearly impossible to distinguish between a soft tone and a loud tone on a hammered dulcimer. Dynamic range is exceedingly difficult to build into a percussive string instrument. Trumpets, drums and woodwinds respond when beaten or blown harder. Yet, traditional folk instruments such as guitars, mandolins, banjos, and dulcimers all have inherently limited dynamic ranges. This feature allows the player expressiveness. A passage may be soft without sacrificing either quality of attack or suffering a stunted playing style. Few, if any, dulcimers achieve this kind of artistic finesse.
4) Intonation: The technical term has to do with how accurately the scale can be played through the range of an instrument. Beginning violinists (and their families) suffer through learning various positions on the fingerboard in order to produce accurate tone. Trombonists have to learn where to position the slide in order to produce an accurate tone. All a hammered dulcimer player can do is strike the tone. Intonation is completely in the hands of the builder. If the design is wrong, the instrument will be sour somewhere in its range. Often the southwest quadrant of a hammered dulcimer, the key of A, is both nasal in its timbre and imperfect in its intonation. It is highly desired that the key of A is as sweet as the key of D or G. That is each key should be as expressive as every other key and have the same dynamics and full sound throughout the range in order for intonation to be dead-on precise, so that the scales work within themselves and in relationship to each other. Tunes that modulate do not thereby impose embarrassing and awkward sounds as a player moves from D to G to A, when there is no degradation in intonation and thereby no degradation in listening experience.
5) Playing Qualities: Hammered dulcimers can be loosely categorized as high or low-tension instruments. Low-tension instruments demand a very careful, delicate playing style. Often such instruments tax and enervate the player because of the extreme attention they require to generate an artistic sound. High-tension instruments tolerate a heavy playing style. The choice in instruments sometimes comes down to timid versus boldxe2x80x94that is to say ballad-style versus old-time-style. It is difficult to find an instrument that tolerates and expresses both playing styles. This design feature may eliminate a player""s ability to produce soft, gentle but clear tones, or require the dulcimer to be nursed to produce the sound a tune demands.
6) Sound Quality or Voice: Sound quality is the most difficult attribute for a designer-builder team to achieve. Sound quality has to do with the overall effect of a dulcimer""s sound throughout its range. This is entirely related to how effectively an instrument expresses the overtone series. The subtlety of this measure of an instrument is what separates a Stradivarius from just a violin. A quality sound is an amalgam of complex sound waves that produces an expressive, convincing, moving, and appealing timbre throughout the range of the instrument. Nothing could be tougher to accomplish for a builder and designer.
7) Stability: Temperature changes, humidity changes and jarring are severe on the tuning of a dulcimer. Stability of the instrument is its ability to resist going out of tune under such adverse conditions.
8) Sustain or Decay: The amount of sustain required in an instrument is determined by the type of music that will be played. Unlike the piano or wind instrument, a dulcimer has no means for controlling its sustain. Whatever the builder creates is what the player has to work with. If the instrument is to be used for nothing but fast fiddle tunes, the sustain should be minimal. It is not difficult to build an instrument with short sustain properties. If the instrument is to be used for nothing but slow, airy, chord-filled pieces, lingering sustain is important. Ballads, hymns, new age pieces often need extended sustain characteristics to make the presentation a success. Most people play a range of music requiring both styles. Balance of sustain and decay are satisfying to the listener and player by providing sufficient sustain to create character without so much sustain that the listening experience becomes a muddy, sonic garble.
9) Tonal range: This term refers to the number of octaves covered and whether the octaves are diatonic or chromatic, which is a function of the number of string sets of different tones and the overall size of a hammered dulcimer. This quality is not involved in the structural novelty of the present invention.
10) Ease of tuning: A typical 16/16 hammered dulcimer has sixteen string sets on the treble bridge and sixteen string sets on the bass bridge, with each set having two strings. Thus there are sixty-four strings to adjust and if one is not very careful one string will be sounded at the bridge and another adjusted at the string block, which can result in breakage. Also it is necessary to tune each side of the treble bridge separately, which adds another thirty-two tunings. According to ones tonal tolerance, the process may be repeated one or more times, as the tuning of one string may affect the others. Even this may not produce accuracy on either side of the bridge if the bridge is not true or is not properly placed. Further, friction at the bridge may result in uneven tension across the bridge. The manufacturer can help by improving the stability and improvement is also obtained by accurate placement of the bridge.
11) Durability or Strength: For a portable musical instrument, the hammered dulcimer is heavy, with a modern light instrument maybe weighing twenty-five pounds, and the stand adding extra weight. Manufacturers frequently sacrifice strength for weight saving and many such instruments develop warped tops and implode, in addition to loosing stability.
12) Weight: While lightness is desired, it is difficult to reduce weight without sacrificing others of the attributes listed here.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a hammered dulcimer with features to improve the factors of: aesthetic appearance, attack, dynamic range, intonation, playing qualities, sound quality or voice, stability, durability, ease of tuning, sustain or decay, and weight. By actual construction of test dulcimers with and without the features, improvement has been obtained by: novel connections of the string blocks to the braces and top, without increasing mass of the components; novel construction of the bridges that control the flexibility of the bridge in contacting and vibrating with the top; controlling the paths of the tones through the bridge differently according to the frequency of the tones; improving the action of the top through a composite bridge support of novel shape and materials; providing tuners at each end of the strings to improve tuning accuracy across the bridge; indicia on the string terminators to coordinate identification of a string at the terminator to correspond to a bridge position; providing a high percentage of elongated sound holes at the front and rear adjacent the top; and floating the top at such sound holes and for a major portion of the area immediately above the interior braces.